Dia:Beacon, the contemporary art museum that opened six years ago and has helped attract artists and galleries to the city.
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EVEN before it opened six years ago in a former Nabisco cracker box factory, Dia:Beacon, the largest museum of contemporary art in the country, had set in motion a cultural makeover in this once-forlorn river city. The mere anticipation of its arrival turned empty storefronts into gleaming galleries and coaxed residents of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and other artistic enclaves in New York City to relocate here.

In the years since, Beacon has solidified its reputation as a destination for art in much the way that Hudson, N.Y., transformed itself into a mecca for antiques.

The sudden bloom of spare white spaces, in which art is front and center, has been joined by cafes and shops, making Beacon an attractive place to contemplate the creative process and while away an afternoon or evening. In fact, Beacon has followed the lead of other towns in the Hudson Valley by designating one Saturday a month  in its case, the second  as a day when galleries stay open late amid live entertainment.

To appreciate how a single institution can jump-start a whole town, start your visit at Dia:Beacon. The installations, by modern giants like Andy Warhol, Richard Serra, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, sprawl across vast galleries, which total more than a quarter of a million square feet. With the arrival of spring, the museum stays open later since it relies on rows and rows of skylights to illuminate the galleries  until 6 p.m. starting in mid-April, as opposed to 4 p.m. in winter.

Children especially seem to appreciate the playfulness and strangeness of some of the works, like “North, East, South, West,” by Michael Heizer, which comprises four giant depressions in the floor of one gallery, their simple geometric voids plunging 20 feet. Serra’s “Torqued Ellipses” are lofty walls of rust-hued steel that curl inward, tilting this way and that. The ones that invite the viewer along a narrow path to the center are particularly disorienting, but pleasantly so.

The museum’s excellent bookstore  long on books and short on gifts  is a nice way to end your museum tour before going gallery-hopping.

It is a short drive, or a half-mile walk, to Beacon’s mile-long Main Street, which runs from Route 9D, not far from the Hudson River, toward Mount Beacon, whose gentle dome can be seen in the distance. The two ends of Main Street clearly pulse with the most creative energy, flanking a still-gritty, rather dull stretch that gives a sense of Beacon, pre-Dia.

Housed in an understated gray brick building, Fovea is a nonprofit education organization dedicated to photojournalism. It gives the dictionary definition of the name right on its door: “a small depression in the retina, constituting the point where vision is most clear.” On view through May 3 is an exhibition called “Hard Rain (From Memory to History)” by Anthony Suau, the veteran Time magazine photographer and Pulitzer Prize winner, showing some of his images of conflict from the past 25 years.

A few doors down is the Van Brunt Gallery, which in December relocated from the other end of town to 137 Main Street. A recent show included a luminescent landscape bordering on abstraction and a painted assemblage incorporating bits of wood evocative of a picket fence. In the current exhibition, the owner, Carl Van Brunt, invited six artists  four photographers and two painters  to contribute works that relate loosely to the quadricentennial of Henry Hudson’s historic voyage. The “Quad Show,” which Mr. Van Brunt described as a “postmodern vision of the Hudson Valley,” will be on view through April 27.

Across the street, Hudson Beach Glass, which occupies a beautifully renovated former firehouse, features handmade art glass, both sculptural and functional  from undulating bowls and elaborate light fixtures to jewelry and mobiles. Among the more beguiling objects recently on display were intricate glass pumpkins in unusual colors (purple was my favorite), each topped with a sinuous green stem. An adjoining studio frequently offers glass-blowing demonstrations.

Before venturing to the other end of Main Street, stop in at the Muddy Cup coffeehouse, with its Victorian-inspired chairs in brushed gold and red velvet, for a cup of hot “white” chocolate and a lemon square. Or try the Chill Wine Bar, a new restaurant with a light menu.

More galleries, gift shops and restaurants await in the shadow of Mount Beacon. In a weathered brick building covered with vines, Go North: A Space for Contemporary Art recently featured the work of an Estonian multimedia artist, Marko Mäetamm, whose show, “Another Day With My Family,” explored the relationship between the artist and his family, the family and society, and public versus private through a mix of photographs, sculpture and video.

If you are inclined to linger  perhaps it is the second Saturday of the month  visit the Piggy Bank Restaurant, a lively barbecue restaurant in a former bank building. It is one of the few businesses that strutted into town well before Dia:Beacon opened its doors.